The digital transformation journey: a guide to success

Digital transformation for businesses

Digital transformation remains a hot topic. Searches for the term have risen by over 30 per cent this year alone and global spend is set to hit $1.7 trillion by the end of 2019. Despite this, IDG’s 2018 State of Digital Business Transformation found that while 95% of start-ups have digital business plans, that number falls to 87% of traditional enterprises founded 50 years ago or later. Moreover, only 38% of those traditional enterprises have actually adopted a digital strategy, demonstrating that executing on digital strategy is a major challenge for larger businesses.

Successful organisations are no strangers to change, enterprises have undergone significant disruption over the last few decades, from the early dot com boom to the rise of ecommerce. So how can businesses tackle their next big challenge, digital transformation?

Realistic business transformation

All change comes with challenges but managing transition is also a specialism. Consolidating immediate business needs - driven by demand from customers and internal stakeholders with long term business ambition - is the key to successful business transformation.

While business intent may not immediately translate in to wholesale digital change, the clamour for digital overhaul could put undue pressure on businesses to automate entire business processes as part of one project. This approach is likely to lead to costly and time-consuming projects that don’t deliver the results expected.

Optimisation and automation

Successful digital transformation lies in identifying where digital change can have the biggest short-term impact in order to create the foundations for enhanced connectivity and long-term automation.

All business departments are looking for the progress promised by digital technologies. From digital transformation for HR through to marketing transformation, there’s opportunity everywhere. But this does not mean that it all needs to happen at once, a mistake too many businesses are guilty of making.

All processes will eventually benefit from digitised automation at some point. But overhauling an entire business runs the risk of disruption that leads to the detriment of a company’s short-term performance. Digital transformation should only ever improve the way a workflow runs, optimise existing processes, enhance the customer experience or increase internal efficiency. It should also be part of a longer-term strategy for enabling wholesale digital change but while embracing the hybrid nature of modern working environments and working with the digital and analogue mix that exists today.

This means employing a step by step multi-phase approach to transforming IT operations and not looking for an instant fix to every challenge within an organisation. In short, companies shouldn’t feel in a rush to make all-encompassing change but they should be planning on implementing different ways of working.

As a result, digital transformation should enable and empower organisations to automate and digitise key processes while simultaneously improving the output of non-digital workflows. Of course, progress will continue and digital will eventually become the default way of working. But today, in 2018, these threads will simply continue to connect in a way that slowly but surely improves customer and employee experiences and enable businesses to better organise how they function to avoid disruption while creating value faster and more effectively.

Learn more on how to successfully start the digital transformation journey

Find out how to kickstart your business transformation journey with Canon

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